Site Mobile Navigation

A Time to Remember, and Cash In

Not all remembrances on Memorial Day were about the brave ones who went to war and didn’t come home. Memories were stirring as well among those who, typically without the benefit of ever having been in uniform themselves, sent the brave ones off to war.

We are in a season rich with recollections being offered by key figures in the George W. Bush presidency. They have been busy writing their memoirs, or at least shopping them around — people like Dick Cheney, Donald H. Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Karl Rove and, lest we forget, Mr. Bush himself.

This is to be expected. Once they have let slip the reins of power, senior people in every administration race to their desktops to pound out their side of the story and (no small consideration) to cash in on it. Big time, as Mr. Cheney might say. Former President Bill Clinton remains the gold standard, having received a $15 million advance for a thick memoir judged by some reviewers as notable less for its literary elegance than for its utility as a doorstop.

These books are very important to New York. This city doesn’t have many industries left. The few that survive, like Wall Street and the news media, are hobbling. But we are still the country’s publishing capital. That means we are the capital of self-serving reminiscences. They may or may not be what is known in court as the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but the city’s economy benefits when they are cranked out at a steady pace.

New York also tends to be the first stop when it comes time to huckster these works of self-promotion because we also have Matt and Meredith and Diane and Barbara and Scott and Katie, whose on-air interviews are needed to oxygenate even the most celebrated memoirists. Hey, it’s a living.

As good an example as any is George J. Tenet, a son of Queens who became the director of central intelligence. On his watch in the crow’s nest we had the Sept. 11 attacks and the launching of an unpopular war in Iraq, rooted partly in Mr. Tenet’s assurance — a “slam dunk,” he called it — that Saddam Hussein had an arsenal of illicit weapons. Mr. Tenet parlayed that dazzling record into a fat book contract with HarperCollins.

Last year, it was the turn of Scott McClellan, a former Bush press secretary. Ten months before he left the White House in 2006, he had become “increasingly disillusioned by things,” Mr. McClellan said. Yet he kept his thoughts from the American public — until PublicAffairs paid him for them. Funny how a book deal can loosen the tongue faster than a bottle of 16-year-old Lagavulin.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

Among the latest to join the memoir parade is Mimi Beardsley Alford, a New York woman who had an 18-month-long affair with President John F. Kennedy when she was a young intern in his White House. Ms. Alford acknowledged the liaison soon after it was exposed in 2003. She said then in a statement, “I will have no further comment on this subject, period.”

If only.

Over the Memorial Day weekend, word came that Ms. Alford got a rich advance, said to approach seven figures, to tell her story for Random House. Her agent said it would not be a tell-all memoir. Of course not. Why would anyone care about her romps with the president? We’d all no doubt be eager for Ms. Alford’s musings on life had she fooled around back then with, say, a deputy secretary of the interior.

CERTAINLY, memoirs can be instructive, even inspiring. But there is increasingly no reason to assume they bear even a faint resemblance to the truth.

In the last few years, we have been subject to a fake “true story” about the Holocaust by Herman Rosenblat, a phony tale by Margaret Seltzer about her gang life in Los Angeles and a salacious look at professional baseball players by Matt McCarthy, whose fealty to facts has been strongly challenged. Who doesn’t remember James Frey’s account of drug addiction that proved to be bogus, shattered into a million little pieces?

Given some of their past statements, the Bush administration officials now birthing memoirs are bound to contradict one another as well as the likes of Mr. Tenet and Mr. McClellan. Good luck trying to figure out where reality lies.

War, it seems on this Memorial Day, isn’t the only human endeavor whose first casualty is the truth.